The Knick is a gripping TV show set in a hospital, but it's not your typical medical drama. The show, back for its second season on the Cinemax cable network, is set in New York's Knickerbocker Hospital in the early 1900s.

It's a world of white coats, dark hallways and all manner of infectious diseases.

Everything is grimy. The surgeries are often graphic, the doctors' lives often messy — and the racial and anti-immigrant sentiments fester like an open wound.

NPR continues a series of conversations about The Race Card Project, where thousands of people have submitted their thoughts on race and cultural identity in six words. Every so often, NPR Host/Special Correspondent Michele Norris will dip into those six-word stories to explore issues surrounding race and cultural identity for Morning Edition.

Was screenwriter John Ridley a bit nervous the night before this year's Academy Award nominations were announced? Absolutely.

How could he not be, when everywhere he went people approached him to say that he deserved an Oscar nod for his work on the film 12 Years a Slave. But those nerves were not evident when he sat down before a live audience at NPR Headquarters just hours before he did indeed get that Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.